19" LCD Monitors Roundup. Part VIII.. Page 15

Another article in our 19-inch roundup series will be devoted to 12 monitor models from such well-known brands as ASUS, BenQ, HP, LG, NEC, Samsung and Viewsonic. Besides discussing their features we will also dwell on the details of brand name image-enhancing settings offered by the monitor makers these days.

The brightness and contrast settings are set at 100% and 70% by default. To achieve a 100nit white I reduced them both to 53%. The brightness is regulated by means of backlight modulation at a frequency of 239Hz.

The average irregularity of backlight is 3.8% on black and 2.9% on white, the respective maximums being 13.9% and 9.3%. That’s a very good result for this test.

The monitor has no problems reproducing color gradients. Darks are distinguishable from each other at any value of contrast. When the contrast setting is increased above the default value, light halftones merge into white.

The gamma curves don’t look good at the default settings. Every curve has a too high gamma (they all go above the theoretical curve). The curves are also different from each other. The characteristic bend in the top part of the curves is indicative of a too high contrast.

When the contrast is reduced, the bend in the top right of the diagram disappears and the curves get closer to each other, but the value of gamma is still too high, resulting in a high-contrast image.

The color temperature setup is depressing: darks are some 3000K colder than lights. The temperature dispersion amounts to 10.000 in the 9300 mode. Gray tones look bluish on the L192WS, which can be easily seen with a naked eye.

The color gamut is normal, but the point of red is shifted further away from the one of the sRGB color space than on most other LCD monitors.

That’s just what you can expect from a matrix that lacks Response Time Compensation: the declared speed of 5 milliseconds is indeed achieved on black-to-white transitions, but it is much worse on gray-to-gray transitions. As a result, the average speed is 12.5 milliseconds GtG and the maximum is 23 milliseconds. Of course, this matrix is not fast. Even the RTC-enabled VA matrix of the above-described HP LP1965 outperforms it easily.

The contrast ratio is suitable for work, but its maximum doesn’t reach 300:1. That’s mostly due to the high level of black.

The LG Flatron L192WS is a typical representative of the class of inexpensive, office-oriented widescreen monitors. A very uniform backlight is in fact the only good point of this model. Its other characteristics are far from impressing. It’s got a slow TN matrix with poor color reproduction setup. This monitor should only be used for working with text.